 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. Evolutionary insights into modern health. Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. I'm Todd Becker. We're starting a new feature on the podcast called Second Look, where we replay selected talks from past Ancestral Health symposium conferences that we think will interest you. Today's Second Look talk happens to be one that I gave in 2014 at the AHS meeting in Berkeley. The title is Myopia, a modern yet reversible disease. Myopia is also called nearsightedness. It's a refractive defect of the eye where close-up objects are in focus, but more distant objects appear blurred. So glasses or contacts are typically prescribed to correct the condition. Although in reality, they don't actually correct the underlying problem, they're just a crutch that aids you in seeing more clearly, but often they end up making the problem worse and stronger lenses are needed. I wore glasses for my own nearsightedness starting in high school, and over time the eye doctor kept increasing the strength of the prescription until I discovered how to get rid of my glasses when I was in my 40s. The first part of the talk is about the increasing prevalence and causes of myopia, including the underlying biology of how the eye becomes myopic by increasing in axial length, mainly due to environmental factors such as horror vision hygiene, things like spending too much time reading and looking at screens up close and not enough time looking at things in the distance. The second half of the talk builds upon this biological understanding to reverse the process. I describe in detail how to use an active focusing technique to reverse myopia and restore normal vision. I adapted this method from research and practices used by others, but I developed the specific active focusing technique myself. I first wrote about my success and the active focusing approach in 2010 on my blog, Getting Stronger. It's one of many applications of a general biological principle known as hormesis, which is the judicious application of low-dose stress to make the body and metabolism more resilient in many different ways. The talk you're about to watch or listen to on the podcast is about reversing myopia or nearsightedness, but I also indicate how the same general principles can be used to reverse hyperopia or farsightedness. That's the condition where you have trouble focusing on fine print or objects up close, which is something that many people encounter as they get older. I do want to correct two minor errors where I misspoke during the presentation and only realized it later. About 12 minutes in where I'm discussing a graph from a study on changes in the axial length of the eye, I mistakenly state the units as millimeters, where the graph clearly shows its microns. I did realize and correct the mistake later in the Q&A section, but in that section I also incorrectly described a condition where one eye is dominant for distance and the other for close work. I refer to it as ambelopia, which actually refers to a different condition. What I meant to talk about was a term called monovision. This talk on myopia reversal happens to be the single most popular reported talk on our Ancestral Health Society YouTube channel with well over a million views and over 4,000 comments. The comments fall roughly into three categories. A small number are from skeptics who don't believe it's biologically possible to reverse myopia, so they dismiss the talk. A larger number are from viewers who actually applied the technique with success and they either reduced their prescription or they got rid of their glasses or contact lenses entirely. And then there's another group with questions from people who are interested in trying out the technique, but they're unsure about certain details. And so for them I created an FAQ post on my blog that answers many of those commonly asked questions, and I've put a link to the blog post and several other references in the show notes. I hope you'll enjoy watching or listening to the talk. You can leave comments or questions on the YouTube version of this podcast. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. How many of you wear glasses or contact lenses? That's a pretty good percentage of the audience, all right? So we're going to be talking about your eyes today and I hope you'll find the talk interesting, but I'd like to start out with two pictures. Both of them feature myself and my daughter. The first one on the left was on a merry-go-round at the San Francisco Zoo when she was about a year old, and the one on the right was more recently. And you might notice some differences between the picture. Well, beside the fact that my hair is gray, I was wearing glasses in the one on the left about 20 years ago. And so part of the talk today is my story about what I did to learn about myopia and how I got rid of my glasses. But the talk really has two parts. The first part is going to be about the causes of myopia and you really have to start there if you're going to be effective in reversing myopia. And the second half will be a technique that I've developed and it's similar to techniques that others have developed, but it's my own particular twist on it on how to use active focusing to reverse myopia. The photograph there shows some girls in high school in Singapore in a language arts class using their iPads and you can see that all the girls in the class are wearing glasses. In some of the Asian countries, like Singapore, myopia is very prevalent. So first of all, what is myopia? Well, it's colloquially nearsightedness and what it is biologically is a refractive defect of the eye where when you're looking in the distance, distant objects appear blurred because the images are focused in front of the retina rather than on the retina. It's really a very common disorder, probably the most common refractive error of the eye and it's becoming more prevalent and severe myopia can lead to macular degeneration, cataracts, eye floaters, retinal detachment in serious cases. So it's something to be concerned about. Now my talks about myopia, but some of you are farsighted and have hyperopia, it's the opposite condition. I had to focus the talk so I chose myopia because it's more common but a lot of the principles here, if you pay attention, apply to hyperopia as well. So question is, is myopia caused genetically or is it environmental? There's evidence on both sides. For example, twin studies and parent child studies show a higher correlation than you would get with fraternal twins or just by chance. There's a number of gene mutations that have been identified like SCO2, which has to do with copper metabolism, which are implicated in severe myopia. And there's wide variation between different ethnic groups. So for example, it's much higher in Asia, 70 to 90% in some countries, maybe a third of people in the US or Europe have myopia, and it's much less common in Africa. On the other side, there's a lot of environmental factors. So for example, there's been a large increase among Aboriginal peoples, for example, Eskimos, once they were introduced to Western schooling. There's a correlation between achievement level in school or academic level in myopia and there's some experimental demonstrations that defocus generated by close work is the cause of myopia and we'll be getting into that in some detail. If you go back some of the early studies on myopia, there's one from Holland in the 1880s looking at military recruits, looking at the occupations of where people came from when they were coming into the army. And if you looked at farmers and fishermen, it was about 2.5% prevalence of myopia. If you looked at leather workers who used their hands, coursework, maybe about 5%, hand workers who were doing fine work, perhaps jewelers, it jumps up to 12%, merchants who were doing a lot of accounting work, paperwork, 15% and advanced students about a third. So that was some indication that there might be a relationship between the kind of activity you're doing and the incidence of myopia. If you look more recently, myopia has really increased since 1970, right, in all age groups. And what this shows here are different age groups from youth to my age where the incidence and prevalence of myopia has almost doubled and the gray and black show the incidence of the more severe or advanced types of myopia where you see particularly a large change. So if you look also at Aboriginal peoples, I think a good example is Eskimos and this was a study done by Francis Young in 1969 in Alaska. If you look at the incidence by age group, it's very interesting because in 1969 there had been a school in operation for about 30 or 40 years. So those folks who were older than 40 had not had Western education and you can see there's virtually no incidence of myopia there whereas those who had been introduced to Western schooling had in some cases more than 50% incidence. Again, some evidence of an environmental factor. If you look at Germany, there was a study done just recently where people who did not complete secondary or vocational education had maybe 20%, 30% myopia. Those who completed their secondary education had bumped up to maybe 35 and then those who completed university more than half of them had myopia. And there's some geographic distribution that indicates countries where particularly in Asia where there's more schooling. Even at young ages like seven to nine we see that in Singapore for example 34% myopia whereas Nepal it's only 3% and that compares to a modest maybe 7% or 8% in the US again in school children. So there's another environmental factor which is diet. And there's some studies particularly by Cordain showing that for example eating a lot of carbohydrates not surprisingly might induce higher incidence of myopia and it's been tied to hyperinsulinemia to excess carbohydrate intake to a deficiency of fish oil and essential fatty acids and to mineral deficiencies. Now Cordain took the view that actually genetics were not that important because he was studying children in the islands of Vanatua who were in school eight hours a day and yet they only had about 2% myopia. But as I'll argue later it's not genetics or environment but I think the two come together. If you think about it in terms of epigenetics or environment acting on the genes it's kind of like alcoholism, right? You can have a gene for predilection to alcoholism but if you're not exposed to alcohol you won't have that condition. Well there was a study done by Douglas Frederick in 2002 showing that if you had the genetic indicators for myopia and you engaged in practices myopic genetic practices like education, near work you could get strong myopia more than two diopters. Whereas if you're not predisposed and you had those habits you might get some milder myopia. However, if you had practices that were non-myopic genetic basically either a low level of education or occupation that didn't involve a lot of near work there was either mild or no myopia. It's a very interesting paper. Let's get into the biology. How can you explain this? So I think it's important to start with an understanding of how the eye focuses light. If you look at the eye it has this lens in it the crystalline lens which just as in a camera can change shape to focus light on the back of the retina where you perceive the image. Now when you're looking at distant objects and most of the rays are coming in parallel the lens is fairly flat so there's not much focusing needed. However when you're focusing close up the lens actually has to expand and become more curved and just like with a magnifying glass you'll tend to be able to focus the light. Now a healthy eye can go back and forth between those two focusing states rather easily. However what happens in myopia it really is a process that develops in a couple of stages. So first of all as we saw in the previous diagram you have a thinned lens when you're looking at far objects and you have a thickened lens when you're looking at near objects. If you spend a lot of time working on the computer or reading or looking at your smartphone after a while when you're doing near work the lens will spasm and it will be much harder for it to thin out again when you look in the distance. So now when you look in the distance rather than focusing on the retina you're focusing in front of the retina and you perceive a blurred image. So this can be transient you know and this is what happens when you might be in grade school but if you're doing a lot of near work or you're looking at your smartphone all the time that spasm becomes more permanent and so you go to the optician and the optometrist and they fit you with minus lenses which are convex lenses and when you put those in front of the eye it sort of has the effect of making it look as if you're seeing things in focus when you're looking in the distance and all is well. However there's a problem here because that distance correction now causes focusing behind the retina when you're looking up close and this induces a very interesting process and I'll get into the biology of it whereby the eye elongates and the axis of the eye gets longer and it has to do with a biological mechanism having to do with defocus. Now when the eye elongates all of a sudden the eye is longer this is fine when you're doing near work or you're spending most of the time however you get the same problem as you did with pseudomyopia in that you're now focusing in front of the retina and those images are how to focus so what do you do? You go back to the optician and get a stronger prescription and the process repeats itself over and over and over again and this was my experience where I had to get stronger and stronger prescriptions in order to see and focus. So there's a theory called the incremental retinal defocus theory and this was developed by Hung and Shia Freda and there's some very interesting recent data in humans showing that if you actually fit a person with a minus lens the axis of the eye will grow and here in just the course of an hour the length of the eye is increased by more than 5 mm which is significant because the eye is only 25 mm long on the other hand if you put a plus lens in front of the eye over the course of an hour it will shrink by about 10 mm and if you just put a neutral lens on there's no change now this is a study in humans this is very recent a lot of the older data was in primates and in chicks but this is exciting because they now have tools using a photometer where they can actually measure the length of the eye when you're focusing and this is I think pretty interesting proof of what's going on so what's actually happening is that when you're fitting the eye with this lens and you're focusing behind the retina there's a process by which there's a growth of scleral tissue and the scleral tissue grows in response to some neuromodulators that are secreted when there's a defocus it's actually quite interesting it's been experimentally demonstrated so these neuromodulators increase the elasticity of the scleral tissue and allow the eye to elongate the same process by the way can happen in hyperopia where you're focusing in the other direction and you can cause the eye to become shorter so let's see if we can put this into a practice can we take this learning and turn it into actually a method for reversing myopia I mean there you saw an experimental demonstration how actually putting a lens in front of the eye can change its shape so in this regard I'd like to touch on a key principle that I write about in my blog getting stronger and that is hormesis hormesis is a beneficial response of an organism to a low dose stressor that's otherwise detrimental or lethal and it works by activating various defense or repair mechanisms and there's a lot of examples you might be familiar with for example exercise and immunization calorie restriction exposure to hot or cold these provoke an adaptive response UV radiation phytonutrients formation calluses if you play the guitar go barefoot you get the growth of skin there and I will argue that active focusing is also analogous to exercise in this respect exercise particularly weight lifting is a great example of hormesis if you're lifting heavy objects you're causing these micro tears micro trauma to the muscle and you get a super compensation as a result as long as you don't overdo it your muscles will grow back stronger the key is you've got to do training optimally by working at the edge of failure over train you'll damage the muscle if you under train you don't get a response and this is sometimes called the specific adaptation to impose demand or the said principle so how can we apply this to reversing myopia but first imagine that you walked into a gym and you wanted to get stronger and you applied the same model that a optomist tris did now you go into the eye doctor and what they're giving you when they give you a pair of glasses is essentially a crutch right you want to have immediate satisfaction see things crystal clarity right away you don't want to do any work well if you went into the gym and instead of working out they said here we're going to put an exoskeleton on you and this is not a joke there's a defense contractor who's actually proposing this for soldiers who have to go on long you know hikes and training missions that you would wear this exoskeleton and as you move that would amplify the strength that would make life easier well what do you think would happen if you wore this exoskeleton all the time probably the same thing that happens to astronauts in space their muscles atrophy, they get weaker and when they take off the exoskeleton the problem's even worse well my argument is this is exactly what you're doing when you're wearing glasses you're weakening your eyes so let's talk about then how we can apply hormesis to make your eyes become less myopic first of all there's print pushing and plus lenses which you use while you're reading secondly there's for distance there's the use of progressively weaker lenses or fusion of ghosted images which I'll talk about so you first have to understand how myopic you are and the best way of doing this is to use a Snellen chart you're all familiar with this if you've gone to the DMV it's a series of letters with different lines and you stand 20 feet back and see how far down you can read so if you could read down to line 4 there, let's say line 5 the PEC FD you would have 2040 Snellen score which means you can see at 20 feet what a normal person can see at 40 feet and if you can only read the E at the top well then you've got a problem but if you translate that into the prescription you'll get so if you look at that 2040 person they might get a prescription that's about 0.75 diopters which means they could see normal sized text about 52 inches in front of them without glasses all right so you first have to know your strength now here's where the interesting thing comes in if if you really want to work on reversing your myopia you have to read without glasses if you have so I'd like to distinguish three different distances and this is my daughter acting as a model here in front of the computer so you're sitting at the computer or a book and you're reading take off your glasses now if you wear them and hold some printed matter in front of you hold it and you can see things just in focus and pull it in that's D1, that's what I call the edge of focus now push it out just a little bit further until it just starts to blur you can just see that beginning of blur and that's what I call the edge of blur and that is D2 push it back a little further away and it starts to become indistinct, that's too far that's the edge of readability well this is analogous to when you go into the gym choosing the proper weight that's putting you right at the edge of discomfort and what you want to do is if you're let me go here is move back and forth between D1 and D2 while you're reading and just keep pushing it a little bit and you'll feel that it's a little bit discomfort a little bit uncomfortable but never painful and never difficult and so you'll be reading between D1 and D2 and do this for about 2 to 4 hours every day take a break every 15 to 30 minutes or so and eventually what you'll find is you can increase D1 and D2 you can push it a little bit further away maybe the second day you'll get another inch away alright, keep doing this you'll be surprised actually by how quickly it works once you get to 20 inches away if you can see that you're in great shape now you use plus lenses alright, so myopia is strong, you don't need to use anything but if your myopia starts to get weaker now you use plus lenses so here's what you do if your correction is a little bit weaker if you need if you have a correction of less than minus 2 diopters you go into the pharmacy and you'll see these racks with readers and you might try on the plus 1 plus 1.25 or the plus 1.5 pick a pick a pair so that you can read comfortably at 15 to 20 inches so now you're actually starting to handicap yourself this is like going for a run carrying weights right, and you're going to get stronger faster this way you might buy several pairs and as you get stronger and stronger you might be up to a plus 2 now you're going to find that as you look at the distance everything is starting to get clear keep going and keep testing your snellan every week to see if you can read further and further down on those lines okay what do you do when you're not reading? say you're going for a walk watching TV you're sitting in a room like this and you want to improve maybe you're riding as a passenger in a car I wouldn't advise this when you're driving alright so what you do there is weaker lenses so let's suppose your prescription is for a minus 3 right so get a minus 2.5 now maybe your optometrist is cooperative and we'll do that for you but if not go to online go to zennioptical.com put in your prescription and you have here some frames about $7 and with the lenses it might cost $20 order yourselves a few pairs of progressively weaker if you're at minus 3 get a minus 2.5 get a minus 2 get a minus 1.5 and then as you get better and better move down to the weaker lenses okay now I'm going to talk about a technique which is really fun and very playful in the spirit of Darrell Edwards and this is a real story how did I actually discover this technique well I was vacationing and I left my glasses on the other side of the US so I was without glasses for two weeks and at first I was very frustrated I brought some good books to read and my eyes were all blurry so I went for a walk and said okay I'm just going to see what I can do without glasses what I noticed is that when I looked in the distance particularly at objects that had sharp contrast like the edge of a building or overhead telephone wires that I could see a crisp image and next to that a very faint secondary image and this is sometimes called Diplopia or double vision it's not a serious problem unless it's in a single eye which then you should see your eye doctor but generally it's just a refractive issue when your eyes are have mild myopia not very strong myopia you'll see these two images sometimes you'll see more than two and it's really just a refractive phenomenon actually quite useful because the more you stare at this you'll find that one of those two images is darker than the other and as you keep staring you'll find that one gets darker and the other gets lighter and fainter and eventually it fuses and this was very exciting discovery for me that by looking at distant objects particularly with high contrast I could start fusing the images so this was my method of focusing and looking in the distance and the plus lenses for working at the computer okay so there's some some key questions here just the method really work how much time should I spend each day doing this how long before my vision improves and is this the same as the Bates method well a couple facts first of all it worked for me and for really dozens of others and I write a blog gettingstronger.org there's two posts in particular that I encourage you to look at that have to do with vision improvement one of them is called improve vision and throw away your glasses and then I have a forum where there's a thread called eyesight without glasses and these have over 100,000 views and also I'll show you some slides with references at the end of the talk and they'll be on my website if you're skeptical or if you want to follow up on the science behind this how much time should you spend at it first of all you've got to have the right mindset these are not exercises that you do like going to the gym these are activities you integrate into your daily activity while you're working at the computer while you're at work every day or while you're going for walks spend at least two to four hours print pushing without plus lenses if you have strong myopia and with plus lenses with myopia and take breaks it's very important don't sit there looking at the screen all the time look in the distance look up close look near or look far key point again it should feel awkward but never painful if you do get red eye or strain stop take a few days off try it again how long does this take to work that's the other question I always get again be patient it took years for your eyes to get into this condition it's not going to change overnight how do you approach exercise going to the gym and diet you don't expect immediate results you've got to work at this however keep in mind that you're going to see clearly that's going to be exciting the one thing I have to say here is that this was the most exciting thing for me to be able to take off my glasses and see everything see crisp detail to see expressions to see the leaves on trees find little branches to see little patterns in the sky that I'd never seen before if that doesn't motivate you I don't know what can it's just incredibly liberating to be free of your glasses and not to have contact lenses so typically most people see some improvements within a few weeks and the rate of improvement is generally faster in the beginning it's common to see a sudden improvement and then no change for a while and then a sudden improvement but that's the way it works with going to the gym or losing weight it's not a steady line but again the excitement comes at the end when you don't need glasses anymore is this the same as the Bates method? well not really Bates had a theory that you need to relax the eye that's the idea of physiology he thought that focusing the eye's muscles had to do with muscles that surrounded the eye tensing or relaxing and that you were actually changing the shape of the eye we now know that's not the case it's the ciliary muscles changing the shape of the crystalline lens I mean he was probably right about eye strain and the fact that you need to relax however he only addressed really half the problem which is what I called pseudo myopia right that initial period where you're not being able to see and focus he really didn't address axial myopia because he didn't know that the eye would get longer or shorter and unfortunately his methods of relaxation and distance viewing, they're great I think they're fantastic but they really don't do anything for those of us who are sitting at a computer all day because you can only spend a certain amount of time looking in the distance and what we know from the incremental retinal defocus theory is that it's kind of the time averaged exposure to different focal lengths that's important so if you're going to be spending a lot of time at the computer you need a technique and that's where the print pushing idea comes right holding the piece of paper or the screen at that right distance not getting too close, not relying on your lenses but working right at that threshold between focus and blur focus and blur it's a very tiny threshold and you can find it pretty easily alright so that's what Bates didn't offer okay so I would like to summarize your eyes are adaptive organs just like your muscles, just like your metabolism just like everything about you you've been reading close up for years you've been working with smartphones those are a particular problem with kids they're looking at their smartphone or their video game all the time and as a result your lenses are in spasm you need progressively stronger lens prescriptions to correct that problem but that only makes your eye get longer and your myopia worse so reverse the process do the opposite use that same adaptability to reverse the process and use active focus take time out from your busy routine look at distant objects move back when you read if you're sitting watching a TV program sit as far back as you can if you're in a lecture hall sit as far back as you can to see everything without your glasses if your myopia is weak and your eyes are getting really good use plus lenses to accelerate the process alright and when you take those plus lenses off you'll find wow everything is really crystal clear so stimulate your eyes it's very important, play with your eyes how fun with this this is not a chore build it into your daily life make it a habit, but make it a game when you're walking along a trail look at every little branch trace those branches look at the shadows see what you can make out there's a wonderful world around you you're not noticing but a fraction of the details and it's just so stimulating to do that without your glasses what I can tell you is the more you do this and the more disciplined you are about doing it the better your results will be so anyway that's all I have to offer you today and I'm happy to take questions first before I take questions I just wanted to flash on here some references on the epidemiology and on the biological mechanism alright this will be on the video and you can take a snapshot of the day on methods that you can use to improve your vision and some websites I particularly recommend the DeAngelis book and the Saverson book and Otis Brown really good methods in my site gettingstronger.org Frownfeld Clinic PowerVision System these are all good sites that have similar methods okay we have time for 10 minutes I'll take the first one yeah thanks that was really interesting I was wondering do you still have to do these types of exercises now or are you just kind of cured so just as you would when you're fit you go to the gym every so often right I would say periodically I have a pair of plus lenses if I'm reading a lot I'll pull them out and use them for a bit but not very much actually what I'm going to do is just sit back a little bit further from my screen and try to avoid the bad habits in the first place with the screen being such a potentially negative part of the environment I noticed that the your daughter was modeling in front of the screen is it better to try to train with books and not look at screens is there a certain volume of you know time to look at a screen considering how much you said the pictures are damaging our eyes yeah I think it's preferable to have a well lit book in front of you would be ideal but sometimes you don't have that option so if you are doing computer work I don't see any real difference as long as you have good lighting and you're healthy you can use a computer or a book okay so it seems that in my family we run myopia my brother has two eyes that are around 21,000 so he just can't do anything without glasses I have an unusual problem that this eye is perfect and this eye is really myopic when I go to the Snellen charts I can't read the biggest letter anymore but the problem is that I remember what it is so so your two eyes are different and this is by the way very common it's called Ambulopia I have it too, in fact I have one eye that's slightly farsighted and one that's slightly nearsighted so here's what you do if you have the two different eyes block one eye and work with the weaker eye because your stronger eye is going to dominate and do more work for you you can put a patch on your glasses you can just hold your hand like this or you can wink wink from one eye to the other and it's awkward at first to put your winking muscle get stronger I have 2020 and 2400 so my problem is I can read right here and I can read right here and it's only right here that's difficult because my eyes are not used to vying for dominance and they don't like that so I should probably read a lot right here so my eyes get used to seeing three dimensionally yeah but your eyes are so different I think you probably want to work your weaker eye first until it gets closer because it's much easier to do this method when your eyes are close so in my case my left eye was weaker and I spent a lot of time working that until the two were even so would you have some advice for my brother who would probably have to be about this close to the computer before he could be at the edge of readability that's tough but that's where you start maybe his nose will get in the way so you start one thing he can do is use weakened prescription so cut a few diopters off the prescription so that you're at a reasonable distance in this case it would be a minus prescription but just weaken the prescription and start there great thanks for someone with a really strong prescription if they go through this process are they going to have to replace their glasses along the way because it can be pretty pricey yes and that's why I recommended this website www.colle.com very inexpensive frames get several pairs for $15 or $20 frames or glasses about $6 for the frames and with lenses it might be $20 to $30 total similar question about I have a minus 6.5 and a minus 5 do I do I just do like a negative 6 and leave this the same or do I kind of step them both back at the same time without the blinking thing yours are pretty close so they might work but if you want wink or block the stronger eye and work with the minus 6.1 first until it's down to a minus 5 and you can use the Snellen chart there too with a single eye read as far as you can and wait until your eyes are more even and then they'll proceed together what if you went into the gym and you had a strong right arm you would want to work the weaker arm first until they were both similar so I could get glasses that I only am stepping down one lens for something like that or just put a patch or a diffuser in front of one lens hi I was just curious to see how much your axial length has actually changed since doing this method unfortunately I don't have the device for measuring my axial length that requires a sophisticated apparatus however the study that I cited there you can read about 28 different patients and see all the measurements that were made on their eyes but typically if you look at the results that they got it would be by several millimeters so I saw several microns yes so I think one of the things that your method teaches is improving your visual acuity and not necessarily changing the optics of the eye which is which can help but I just want to say that it is the optical issues that are in place are not being corrected for it's just improving your visual acuity through practice I just want to say that yeah if you have other eye conditions outside of myopia yes this doesn't deal with those thank you for a very insightful talk I have a question about the font size when you're doing this a lot of people especially here in the bay area in tech are using bigger font size but they're staying at the same distance so would you still recommend even if you use a bigger font size to move away from the screen is that right obviously there's a connection between font size and distance so the recommendation here was for normal size font if it's larger you would have to move back farther to get the same benefit from the distance even despite using a bigger font the problem is focusing on a short distance is that correct that's right so you want to increase the distance whatever the font size is by moving back farther and farther progressively thank you if you have kids who have 20 20 vision how do you prevent them from ending up with glasses like I have so first of all good hygiene which means don't work too close up but if they want to do that they can go by weak plus lenses like the plus ones the readers very inexpensive just go into any pharmacy they're there if they're doing extended work have them wear those a lot of people look at this as a preventive technique and do an experiment have them put the plus lenses on and read for an hour and take them off do you now see the world more crisply and clearly than you did before just ask them okay I think two more questions I've never had an issue with myopia but I'm getting to a point where I need glasses to read and more recently driving at night is less comfortable wondering any ideas around those two issues I think the two go together as you age your vision does deteriorate and it's harder to see things at night in particular one thing I didn't touch on is good diet I think that helps a lot in terms of a low insulin type diet and also plenty of phytonutrients to make your rods and cones healthy so you can detect color in low light but I also just think that these methods of healthy focusing are going to be helpful at night because you'll see the car lights and the details that you need to see more crisply so the same principles the same principles yeah okay final question what would happen if people kept going after division became normal again would it continue improving ah there's one post on an interview that I did on my site with a student who had poor vision he got to 2020 and he said I want to do better than this I want supervision and he got himself down to 2015 it's called how one person improved his vision how one person improved his eyesight and he used the method to get all the way to 2015 and if he kept going like that would that create the opposite problem from myopia? ah no I mean so you can you just get better and better distance vision but you can use the same process for hyperopia if you cannot see things that close up and you have to read like this then do the opposite pull them in pull them in until they're at the edge more close up you basically can change the shape of your eye in either direction by using active focusing right so would continuing after it was normal after myopia is fixed create hyperopia? not necessarily no I mean because as long as you're flexible and you're able to exercise your eye so that you're looking both close up and then the vision and I advocate alternating the two it increases the range of focus from near to far thank you if you improve your myopia using your technique do you think that's going to reduce your chances of macular degeneration? it may if you look at some of the causal contributors to macular degeneration retinal detachment eye floaters you'll see myopia listed prominently there it's not the only cause but there is a connection there okay thank you very much thanks for joining us on this episode of ancestral health today we hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes